Merry Christmas!

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"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."

- Albert Einstein

Jonathan Sharp wrote ...

Hey guys!

I’d like to start off by saying THANK YOU SO MUCH for taking time out of your lives to play GW2 and give us feedback. You gave up the most valuable resource you have on this planet – your time. Due to that, I wanted to give you guys some of my time to show how much we appreciate your feedback and criticisms. Rather than posting individually to your multitudes of concerns, I tried to consolidate them into broad categories, and respond to them all here. I’ll do my best to try to cover as many issues as quickly as possible.

Feedback

We may not have time to reply to every thread (some of these, as you guys know, are many pages long), but we do read them all. We have many people (other designers, programmers, QA, artists) who read the forums, and we bounce emails around internally to talk about issues and ways to fix them. So even if you don’t see responses, please know that we’re reading your feedback and taking it into consideration! I get many messages/emails/people walking by my desk who say, “Hey Chap, did you see X thread? They had some good points.” Even if I can’t respond to everything in the PvP forums, please know that I still greatly appreciate your feedback!

Conquest as our only game type at launch:

We feel that Conquest will be just fine as our only game type at ship! It does a lot of things for us, and I’ll talk more about this in the esport section. But quickly, conquest allows new players to quickly understand how they can help their team. It also creates great tension that’s easy to follow for spectators/announcers. Our scoring system makes it very easy for observers to follow - with a quick glance up at the score screen, you know how close the game is.

The secondary mechanics really change the flow/feel of the map. Our maps all have different strategies/builds that work well on them, and we feel that the secondary/layout really show what conquest is – a strong backbone for our competitive play.

Organized pvp/playing with party:

I think a lot of people are enjoying our PvP, especially people who are new to PvP in general, or new to Guild Wars PvP. This is great! This weekend was a great test for us, and showed that it’s pretty welcoming to new players. But what else is there to the game type? This is where organized play/playing with organized teams/using voice communication/tournaments come in. Keep in mind that this weekend allowed you to join games and play with random teams in order to learn the game. Down the road you’ll be able to play in organized 5on5 squads, and that’s where the game will become deeper and more complex. You’ll need to start thinking about 5 person builds, class synergies, battlefield tactics, controlling secondary objectives and conquest points, etc. The game really changes when you start to play in a 5 person organized team vs. an opposing 5 person organized team. We want both to be fun! I’ll talk about this more in the Esport section.

Tournaments:

Tournaments will allow you to play with an organized 5 person team and see your results as you make your way through a tournament! We didn’t show them this weekend, but they’re something we think a lot of you will really enjoy. Sit tight, they’re coming!

Balance:

First off, balance is not yet final. A lot of us played with you this weekend (even if you didn’t know we were there) and many of us know how to deal with some situations that may not be salient to our newer players. The game is still evolving, even on a daily basis. Things are being added/tweaked/fixed/iterated upon EVERY DAY, and due to that, the game is still in flux. Let’s give an example - the Thief.

Thief. I saw a ton of posts this weekend about the Thief being OP (overpowered) and imba (imbalanced). The Thief can be very strong in some 1on1 matchups, and is weak in others. The Thief is also great in some team compositions, and very weak in others. We’ll keep an eye on Thief balance, but overall they are pretty balanced in the grand scope of things. There are many great Thieves in the office who still run from other classes if they’re well played. Once you learn how the Thief works, you learn how to counter them. As your knowledge base a community matures, you’ll learn how to deal with the Thief as well. Keep in mind you guys only played for a few days, you’ll get better every time you play it, and your view on what’s balanced/imbalanced may change in time.

Melee vs ranged. I also saw a lot of threads on melee vs ranged. I think ranged abilities are much easier to use than melee ones. It’s easier to pick a ranged class, back up a lot, and keep hitting your opponent….but…once a good melee character figures out how to disable your movement, dodge your attacks, and then get you in range, YOU ARE IN TROUBLE. There are many melee builds that destroy ranged builds, but the trick is getting there. Once melee players learn how to work together, you’ll see them dishing out a ton of pain on ranged foes. BUT, having said that, don’t worry – balance isn’t final, and we’re still tweaking things. We’ll keep an eye on the balance, as we always do.

Secondary mechanics. So ya. Svanir and Jotun on the forest map are a little easy. They were way too hard for a bit, and I toned them down, but with the data I collected this weekend, I can safely say they need to be bumped up a little bit. I’ll keep watching the balance on those guys, and the buff they give you, and make sure that they are hard to attain, but well worth the effort. They definitely still need some balance, so I’ll keep looking at that.

E-sport aspirations:

Let’s start this with a question: What does it take to make an Esport? I’d say you need a few things:

Fun. It has to be fun. This is pretty obvious, but let’s be sure to add it to the list. If people don’t enjoy your game, they won’t play it. And "fun" is different from player to player. We need to make a game (with the help of our community), that's fun for new players as well as professionals. It can't just be good for one or the other.

Accessible. It has to be something new players can get into. Magic the gathering. Starcraft. Counterstrike. Basketball. You need the entry level game to be accessible to new players, or you’ll lose your playerbase! You need to feed the pro levels with good players, who in turn come from the mid-tier level, who come from brand new players. And don’t forget, the only way that you get sponsored, if you’re an aspiring pro gamer, if it a LOT of people want to watch your game of choice. Because then they create a spectator base, and sponsors take notice, and want to sponsor athletes in those games. New player accessibility is CRUCIAL to an esport. League of Legends is a very newb-friendly game (mechanically) and it has had great success. That’s why there are so many sponsors…the spectator base is MASSIVE.

Easily understood. Capture points and secondary mechanics are pretty simple. That’s why we’ve based our competitive game on them. Now, once you start to play in 5on5 teams, you learn how far you can push the game, how much you can do with your team, and how skill is involved.

Skill cap. In order for a game to succeed, there has to be a skill cap where a good player can exert dominance over a lesser-skilled opponent. This weekend I saw my share of 1on2’s, 2on3’s, 2on4’s, etc. where skill > number of players. I know a lot of you guys are good at other games, but we have some people internally who have played hundreds of hours in PvP. I took my share of 1on3’s at a cap point this weekend, and I’m sure the guys on the other team thought something was broken. The point is – when skilled players start to make teams, and they start to play other organized teams, you’re going to see some amazing stuff. That’s where we’ll start to see players like SlayerS Boxer (SC), Heaton (CS), [Evil] (GW1), and Daigo (fighters).

Support. This is where we come in. We’ll keep balancing the game after ship. We’ll keep listening to feedback from players. As we make new maps, we’ll be listening to the community to see which of the existing maps they like the most, which maps they’d like to see in the future, etc. Our job doesn’t end once the game ships - in many ways, that’s when it starts.

So ya, that’s it. I need to get to work on stuff for our next weekend event! We learned a ton this weekend from watching you guys play, and from reading your posts. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR GIVING US some of your time, love, and effort. We’ll keep working to make the game the best we can, so that new players and pros alike are able to enjoy GW2. We are a company built on iteration, so now it’s time to do another iteration of PvP and balance! Thanks for supporting us and giving us so much constructive feedback to go on!